Scappettone wrote through H.D.'s poem, substituting words but always keeping to parts of speech. She echoes the original at certain moments, creating some rhymes and in a few cases what amounts to a homonymic ("husk"/"dusk") and quasi-synonymic translation ("sought root"/"wrought suit"). The poem is a meta-commentary on imagism, a way of decorating or over-elaborating H.D. whose imagistic lines convey a "piety that veers into preciosity" (the poet's phrase).** Conch-shells become paleo-pines. "Fire on leaf" becomes "California upon weed."

"Vase" can rhyme with "maze" or with "Oz," depending on your class. (Scappettone has introduced the poem at readings sometimes by mentioning this valence, seeming to contribute to the notion that it is a commentary on imagism's social preciousness.)

Click on the link above for this Poem Talk episode, which includes a discussion, and Scappetone reading her poem.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I first fell into the write-through form in spring 2004 when I was a (mature) undergrad studying under Robert Sheppard (20C Blues), sitting at a table gazing out onto the lawn at my mom and dad's house, doodling away on the computer keypad for an hour or so, plodding on with the final poetry task (of writing six poems), and just as tedium started to kick in my eye apprehended Ted Hughs's Lupercal and Sylvia Plath's The Colossus perched on the top of the monitor screen.

I had got them out of the college library and was due to read them that night. As I scribbled away, an idea came after writing the lines

my eye turns toLupercal resting on the Collossus.

I decided to juggle the twenty or so lines I'd already written and reconfigure the exact same words to create the second half of the piece. The challenge I set myself was to use and repeat in a different order, all the words except 'Lupercal resting on the Collossus' - which would only appear once, acting as a dividing line at the mid way point of the piece.

I used all the same words, including the short conjoining words like and, then, the, etc, and it isn't really a poem I would put in my collected, more a low grade abstraction which serves as an example of the form. The words are irrelevant really, as they serve to show the process and demonstrate my first effort at this form.

Beyond the thin crevasse an upward thrust of greenand a snow like freeze of mottled tanhawk across to subtle shades of tapering yellow,brush verde’s tender final trickleand caper to the edge of left.

A rake of garmentin stark white synthetic bluehang inertamidst the narrow band of late spring colourwhose tumbles of profuse symmetry mergein precise disorder with the May dusk.

Falling inward the black moodretreats with the blue nightand I cast for line of weightin the measured glare of nature's balanceand switch on mind to symbol as my eye turns to

Lupercal resting on The Colossus

The two minds whose symmetry in precise disorderhang profuse in a gruff stark black mood- beyond the upward edge of natures tender balance -hawk amidst the line unseenin synthetic shades of inert weightand band across the thin crevasse and thrust symbols,which merge by tumble in a rake of mottled colour.

Yellow green and tan caper into a white,falling like snow to freeze verde blue.

Then - as excited birds of the May dusk -they call my measured glare inwardand taper in retreat to a final tricklethen cast their subtle narrow cryand cajole and dog my garment of responseto the late spring nightlight left fading

A somewhat bland read that doesn't go much beyond novelty, and would certainly not have Neil Astley or Michael Schmidt beating a bath to my inbox with a set of golden handcuffs.

However, doing this was the mental equivalent of knocking down a brick wall and re-assembling it, forcing the mind to perceive each component word and, because of this seperation process, become more attentive to the precise structure of the initial text, alert to every single word. My mind felt like it were straining itself through a seive, as though I had undergone a first bout of physical exercise after a long spell of sedentariness. The fruits of this brain flexing was a sharpening of its overall sense of awareness to individual words, as the mind tweeked to a higher frequency of recognition; like being able to differentiate individual trees in a wood or gaining night vision.

By using small texts to seperate and reconfigure, the mind develops its ability to chop up, jumble, juggle and re-lay language, just like a builder disassembling a structure to reclaim the material for other uses.

I later came to understand that the mental fizz that acts of such concentration in composition creates, equates exactly with one of the four poetic joys in The 7c Cauldron of Poesy prose-poem attributed to Amergin.

'...the joy of fitting poetic frenzy from the grinding away at the fair nuts of the nine hazels on the Well of Segais.'

And creating the piece as a whole was a challenge whose pay off was a second of the 4 Amergin joys, which is the -

'...joy of the binding principle of wisdom after good (poetic) construction.'

Amergin's first joy perfectly describes the excitement we feel in our heads when composing, and the second captures the tranquil sense of completion which comes after our labours cease and their final product is there on-page to look upon and take poetic pleasure in; a sort of, "I made that" feeling, whicht engenders a sense of self dignity and pride.

So, with the mental froth in full bubble I decided to try again, but this time using a Hughes or Plath poem as the text to reconfigure. I read the books and settled on Plath's The Colossus. I wrote a 17 line run up before diving in and setting down the juggled Plath words.

Did her mind’s farthest anchor reach a coloured butterflywind chanced and framed like a Japanese printof bold delicacyfittingly unambiguous in a mirror of detailwhere every line rehearsed perfection,crisp as stalk fresh shoots?

Nosed in did her compass net an imprint ofdiscordant shadow in savage butt and jagged antinomyabsent of balance nature or measure

----------- write through---------

like a ruin of anarchy to the horizon line?Did she mix thirty years of laboured hoursin little pails and gluepotsto create an oracle married in shadow?Crawl like an ant over immense dead stonesin the black fluted nightand proceed to entirely openthe lightning sun with the skull of her brow as it rises?Grunt cackle and glue the silt from her throatto bray at Orestiea,or some Roman mule god with acanthine hairscaling the tumuli of bald acres under red hills?Was she never counted by her fatheror others whonone the wiserno longer listenedas she dredged her bawdy bones of mourningand pieced together with blank eyesher pithy historical mouthpieceleft to colour and stroke our ears?Could we perhaps lunch like barnyard pigs on the cornucopia of starswhich littered her tongue like lysol on clear white platesclimb ladders of weedy cypress jointedby the wind of a blue sky arching above toproperley squat at some old forum and considerlanding keel and plum on the pillar of her great lips?

This is a great method to use on small texts, particularly blogspot comments at various po mo sites, as you can take a slightly pompous sounding deposit and twist it about. It's not important to keep the exact same words I think, only for the very first one you do, as you effectively give yourself an unreal goal and acheive it once then slacken the rules to fit once done. Like deploying meter. Once you have that form to your own personal satisfaction, then you can use it how you wish.

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